Recent Published Pieces

NON-FICTION

Labor Day Rant: Unpaid Internships are Evil

The Story of Story

Louise Glück and the Power of Poetry

Moby Dick, Martin Scorsese, and Making a Literary Life

The American System's Dark Heart: 'Serpico' at 50

Like a Hurricane: The Brilliance of Billy Friedkin's Burned Bridges

Scorsese's Stations of the Cross: 'Mean Streets' at 50

Football and American Faith

The Master at 100: Understanding Max Roach

Medium: Alan Arkin and American Artistry

Medium: Why Milan Kundera Matters

Medium: What Writers Talk about When We Talk about Perseverance

Medium: Jeff Beck, Guitar Grandmaster

Medium: Dark Side of the Moon, Rock Music's Apex at 50

Medium: Why Wayne Shorter Matters

Medium: This Apostle's Creed: Sonny Rollins's East Broadway Rundown

Medium: The Style's the Thing: The Inimitable Martin Amis

Medium: AI Will Not Replace Art

Medium: Pele, Ambassador of Joy

Medium: The Fire Sermon: T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" at 100

Medium: Kurt Vonnegut at 100

The Sound and Vision of Pharoah Sanders

Ray Liotta: Goodbye to a Goodfella

William Hurt: The Complete Package

The Centennial of Charles Mingus

Black and Blue Collar: A Triptych

Exterminating Angel Press: Black and Blue Collar: A Triptych

The PEN/Faulkner Literary Conversations: CRISIS, with T.C. Boyle, Jenny Offill, and Nnedi Okorafor

Authority Magazine: Five Things You Need To Write Powerful and Evocative Poetry

PopMatters Archives

The Weeklings Archives
The Weeklings: Backs to the Future
Exterminating Angel Magazine: Liability
Medium: New World Man, An Appreciation of Neil Peart
PopMatters: Sitting on Top of the World: An Appreciation of Ginger Baker
PopMatters: Ric Ocasek, Just What We Needed
PopMatters: I Like to Re-Watch or, Movies on My Mind
PopMatters: Why Dead Man is Jim Jarmusch’s Masterpiece
Memoir Magazine: Hard To Get Over Lonely People
PopMatters: He’s Martin Amis…And We’re Not
The Weeklings: Just Say (N)Oprah or, Make Great American Again
The Weeklings: Donald Trump: The Man in America’s Mirror
How To Kill a Cliche: Celebrating Sam Shepard
The 100 Best Classic Prog-Rock Albums
On Hipgnosis
Chuck Berry Reinvented Music, and America
The Weeklings: Worst Americans: Cruel DeVos
The Weeklings: The Worst People in America: Dick Cheney
The Weeklings: Participation Trophy Politics
The Weeklings: Tiny Crowds, Tiny Hands vs. Huge Crowds, Huge Hearts
The Weeklings: Cheer Up, Trump Haters: It’ll Get Worse!
The Weeklings: The Democratss Can’t Win if They Won’t Fight
The Weeklings: Thom Jones, The Pugilist at Rest (in Peace)
The Weeklings: Do Atheists Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Weeklings: Rich Assholes Paying No Taxes is Unpatriotic
The Weeklings: Taxi Driver, 40 Thoughts for 40 Years 
PopMatters: Led Zeppelin, Day by Day  
The Weeklings: Three Perfect Albums, Ten Years Later
PopMatters: One Shot: Remembering Cimino’s Masterpiece The Deer Hunter
The Weeklings: Some Men Just Want to Watch the World BERN 
The Weeklings: 50 Bullet Points Concerning America’s Gun Psychosis 
The Weeklings: “20 Minutes of Action” Warrants More Than 15 Minutes of Outrage 
The Weeklings: MURPHY’S LAWS: 46 Infallible Observations for 46 Years
The Weeklings: Talking Trees 
The Weeklings:  David Bowie, The Man Who Owned the World
The Weeklings: Bernin for You
The Weeklings: How To Vote Right: Carly Fiorina
The Weeklings: How To Vote Right: Ted Cruz
The Weeklings: How To Vote Right: Ben Carson
The Weeklings: Hard To Get Over Lonely People
PopMatters: Reassessing Black Sabbath’s Unholy Trinity
Elephant Journal: On Loving & Losing Man’s Best Friends
The Weeklings: O’Connor and Coltrane: Saints of American Art
PopMatters: Edgar Allan Poe’s 10 Best Stories
The Weeklings: Over/Under the Volcano
The Weeklings: On Losing Faith and Finding Myself Instead
The Weeklings: Punch Drunker: The 50 Greatest Movie Fights of All Time
The Quivering Pen: My First Time
The Next Best Book Blog: Where Writers Write
The Weeklings: Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before
The Weeklings: The 50 Greatest Hockey Enforcer Names of All Time
The Weeklings: April 15, 1985: The Fight
The Weeklings: In Defense of Stephen King
The Weeklings: Sorry, Charlie
The Weeklings: What We Talk about When We Talk about Sex (in Fiction)
The Weeklings: The Power of Political Narrative: Part One, The GOP
The Weeklings: The Power of Political Narrative: Part Two, The Dems 
Elephant Journal: Sanctuary, A Path Through Grief
PopMatters: We’ve Seen This Movie Before –Making Sense of Philip Seymour Hoffman
PopMatters: Bright Moments Past: On Music and Loss
The Weeklings: End of Summer (Camp) with a Bat, a Cat and a Clown
The Weeklings: “Mad Men” Eulogies: Don’s Bottle
The Weeklings: Every Dog Owner Has His Day
The Weeklings: Borne Back Ceaselessly Into the Past: Steinbeck, Nostalgia, Empathy and Amtrak
The Weeklings: 50 Albums You May Not Know…But Need To Own
The Weeklings: What We Talk About When We (Don’t) Talk About Dying
The Weeklings: Victory and Sorrow: Bright Moments from Three Masters
The Weeklings: Russell Brand, Revolution, and the Audacity of Apathy
The Weeklings: Lou Reed: Rock and Roll’s Dark, Beautiful Heart

POETRY

The Decolonial Passage: Albert Ayler's Vision

Jerry Jazz Musician: The Charles Mingus Sextet in Europe, 1964

The Good Men Project: Adulting, On Putting Away Childish Things

Exterminating Angel Press: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, 4877 B.C.: UNIVERSE IS CREATED, ACCORDING TO KEPLER

Rough Cut Press: The Unsatisfactory Suicide Note

Words & Sports Quarterly: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, 1967: MUHAMMAD ALI REFUSES ARMY INDUCTION

Blue Mountain Review: St. Elmo's Fire

Jerry Jazz Musician: Now's the Time

OU College of Medicine's Blood & Thunder Review: Sustenance

The Daily Drunk: John Belushi's Bungalow

Washington Writers' Publishing House: DuBose Heyward's Blues

Jerry Jazz Musician: Ron Carter's Fingers

Exterminating Angel Press: Six Haikus for America

Jerry Jazz Musician's Sunday Poem: Charles Mingus's Memento

Humans of the World: Imagined Conversations with People I Love About Trauma

The Decolonial Passage: Pharoah Sanders Donating Blood to Buy Food, 1962

The Decadent Review: St. James's Place

Exterminating Angel Press: In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing

Blue Mountain Review: Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Bottle

The Decadent Review: Richard Pryor on the Sunset Strip, 1982

Jerry Jazz Musician: Chet Baker’s Smog

Washington Writers’ Publishing House: Ghost Poem

Blue Mountain Review: South Loudoun Street: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

The Decadent Review: Chef’s Second Chance

Plum Tree Tavern: The Voices in Your Head

Plum Tree Tavern: South Loudoun Street, First Sustained Frost

The Remington Review: I Want to Write Poems

Decolonial Passage: Howlin’ Wolf’s Harp

Jerry Jazz Musician: Ornette Coleman’s Question

805 Lit + Art: Hagler and Hearns, 1985

Triggerfish Critical Review: The Insane Dog in the Alley

Triggerfish Critical Review: South Loudoun Street, Mid-Afternoon Saturday

Blood & Thunder Review: My Uncle’s Garage

Jerry Jazz Musician: Thelonious Monk’s Moods

The Good Men Project: Chickens

The Good Men Project: Can Your Family Afford to Lose You?

The Good Men Project: Jake LaMotta’s Rage

The Decadent Review: After Chester Higgins’s “Bowery Denizen, 1985”

Exterminating Angel Press: As the Obituary Section Gets Bigger

The Daily Drunk: Something to Remember Me By

The Decadent Review: John Coltrane's Ascent

Book of Matches: Anthropogenic

Ink Pantry: Even the Ugly Blueberry, Dog is God Backwards or Vice Versa, Knights & Squires (Redux)

MAYDAY: Karma Sutra

Jerry Jazz Musician: Sun Ra's Spaceship

The Daily Drunk: Something To Remember Me By

This is What America Looks Like (Anthology): South Loudoun Street, After Midnight, Tonight

The Good Men Project: Me Three

The Wayfarer: Adaptation

Exterminating Angel: Himmler’s First Blasphemy

Jerry Jazz Musician: Booker Little’s Deliverance

Burningword Literary Journal: Sonny Rollins’s Bridge

The Good Men Project: What Gets Heard When Men Won’t Speak

Jerry Jazz Musician: Rahsaan Kirk’s Dream

Sepia: On seeing a scanned Polaroid of a friend before a Grateful Dead show, 1980-something

Empty Mirror: Shafi Hadi’s Silence

The Good Men Project: My Father’s Silence

The Good Men Project: Private Pyle’s Pain

The Good Men Project: The things preparing for a colonoscopy procedure prepares you for

The Good Men Project: Drunk White Dudes Fighting

Exterminating Angel: The Old Man on the Beach with a Metal Detector

Jerry Jazz Musician: Thelonious Monk’s Moods

Jerry Jazz Musician: John Coltrane’s Cancer
Voice Male Magazine: What a Wonderful World?
Nine Cloud Journal: We Were Too Young to be That Old
Bethesda Magazine (Poetry Contest: 2nd Place): Notes from Underground
Exterminating Angel: Peregrination
Written in Arlington (Anthology): Memorial Day
Rough Cut Press: Why the Car Horn is the Perfect Metaphor for Capitalism
Sequestrum: Howlin’ Wolf’s Arena, Bud Powell’s Brain, Sun Ra’s Spaceship
 
Triggerfish: Overtaking a jogger, by bike, on Martha’s Vineyard, As Opposed to Prayer
The New Verse News: Wake
Burningword Literary Journal: Charles Mingus’s Miracle (Pushcart Prize nominated)
Carbon Culture Review: My Wife’s Scars, Night Shift, Incursion, Gatlato el Rijla

Panoply: Liz Taylor’s Talents
Beltway Poetry Quarterly: Work Song
Poetry Matters Project: Work-in-Progress

People’s Tribune: The Voices in Your Head
Sport Literate: Joey Kocur’s Fist

Blotterature: Kurt Vonnegut’s Cigarettes
Linden Avenue: Charles Bukowski’s Bounty
Five:2:One Journal: Charlie Parker’s Premonition
Gyroscope: To the ones that got away

Shot Glass Journal: Intimation